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Originally Posted by Raellus
It must be hard for a small gaming company to get its product out there among the masses in this day and age. I don't fault 93GS for this situation. I'm sure they were doing the best they could with the resources they had. I think it's symptomatic of the PnP RPG industry as a whole.
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I've never been in a position to deal with the business side of operations (always been freelance writing talent, never a "captive" employee), but my understanding is that the game distribution channels have radically contracted over the past decade. I can recall at least three major closures - one that outright destroyed several small publishers whose sole distributor went out of business.
Quote:
Originally Posted by helbent4
As for who I listened to, I had some questions with the rules and figured I should go directly to the horse's mouth. These problems were posted there. In fact, I found a mea culpa from I what i believe were the game designers themselves, about how they tried to adapt T2Ks vehicle combat rules to Reflex and this created unexpected rules conflicts. (Like many things in life, I could be mistaken.) I don't think I'm being unnecessarily harsh if I'm simply agreeing with openly acknowledged flaws.
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I'll own that particular cock-up. This was the intersection of two separate design efforts that I didn't fully test in conjunction with one another before we released.
First was small arms effects on personnel. When we designed this, we went with an all-new damage and penetration formula based on a combination of kinetic energy and cross-sectional area. We calibrated the baseline numbers for a key set of calibers against the expected range of character wound thresholds. Then we set the numbers for body armor so it would equal real-world performance as per NIJ standards. So far, so good.
The problems came when, rather than doing the same thing for heavy weapons and vehicle armor, I tried to keep GDW's 2.0/2.2 values intact to allow easy adaptation of the vehicle guides. Unfortunately, because GDW's small arms damage and armor equivalency scales were different, this created situations where assault rifles could damage, if not outright kill, some AFVs - and a PC wearing Level IV trauma plates had better protection than a Stryker.
If anyone still cares at this point,
here's the thread on the 93GS forum where I posted the complete fix. It's also in the
Driver's Guide: Czech Your Engine manuscript I released in July.
That's certainly not the only rules hole in Reflex. It's far from perfect and I have a laundry list of things I'd change if I had the opportunity to do a second edition of it.
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Originally Posted by helbent4
Bringing this back to Mongoose, updating T2013 had demonstrably mixed results. Arguably, some gamers were at least a little alienated while the hoped-for breakthrough with younger gamers that was apparently the whole point of the exercise wasn't altogether achieved. It's not clear to me why if Mongoose were to take a kick at the can they would want to do it in the same way and expect different results.
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The more I think about this, the more I expect Mongoose is going to attempt to cash in on the nostalgia market and apply their existing Trav rules set to a 1.0 or 2.0 timeline. I have no evidence for this belief beyond the fact that I don't think they did a reboot of the Trav timeline. I doubt it'll be successful, but niche products have surprised me before.
- C.